Justin Lloyd's Thinkering

Somebody needs to think about this stuff...

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Paper – Optimal Tracking Controller Design for a Small Scale Helicopter

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Today I read a paper titled “Optimal Tracking Controller Design for a Small Scale Helicopter”

The abstract is:
A model helicopter is more difficult to control than its full scale counterparts.

This is due to its greater sensitivity to control inputs and disturbances as well as higher bandwidth of dynamics.

This works is focused on designing practical tracking controller for a small scale helicopter following predefined trajectories.

A tracking controller based on optimal control theory is synthesized as part of the development of an autonomous helicopter.

Some issues in regards to control constraints are addressed.

The weighting between state tracking performance and control power expenditure is analyzed.

Overall performance of the control design is evaluated based on its time domain histories of trajectories as well as control inputs.

Paper – Comparing Typical Opening Move Choices Made by Humans and Chess Engines

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Today I read a paper titled “Comparing Typical Opening Move Choices Made by Humans and Chess Engines”

The abstract is:
The opening book is an important component of a chess engine, and thus computer chess programmers have been developing automated methods to improve the quality of their books.

For chess, which has a very rich opening theory, large databases of high-quality games can be used as the basis of an opening book, from which statistics relating to move choices from given positions can be collected.

In order to find out whether the opening books used by modern chess engines in machine versus machine competitions are “comparable” to those used by chess players in human versus human competitions, we carried out analysis on 26 test positions using statistics from two opening books one compiled from humans’ games and the other from machines’ games.

Our analysis using several nonparametric measures, shows that, overall, there is a strong association between humans’ and machines’ choices of opening moves when using a book to guide their choices.

Half of a Christmas tree

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I’ve never understood why manufacturers of artificial Christmas trees do not sell half-trees or three-quarter trees.

Take a Christmas tree and cut it in half, length-wise, so that it can be placed flush up against a wall or in the corner of the room, which is what most people do anyway.

Hardly anyone decorates the back of the tree, or does a very good job with the back of the tree unless they are putting it in a window or have a huge room that allows them to put the tree away from the wall.

Three quarters of a tree would work for when you need to put it in to a corner.

If they start doing this with real trees they could sell them at a discount (doubtful) but would only need around half the trees to fulfil their customers’ requirements.

Paper – Training Gamble leads to Corporate Grumble?

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Today I read a paper titled “Training Gamble leads to Corporate Grumble?”

The abstract is:
Fifteen years of research studies have concluded unanimously that spreadsheet errors are both common and non-trivial.

Now we must seek ways to reduce spreadsheet errors.

Several approaches have been suggested, some of which are promising and others, while appealing because they are easy to do, are not likely to be effective.

To date, only one technique, cell-by-cell code inspection, has been demonstrated to be effective.

We need to conduct further research to determine the degree to which other techniques can reduce spreadsheet errors.

Paper – Bayesian Approach to Neuro-Rough Models

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Today I read a paper titled “Bayesian Approach to Neuro-Rough Models”

The abstract is:
This paper proposes a neuro-rough model based on multi-layered perceptron and rough set.

The neuro-rough model is then tested on modelling the risk of HIV from demographic data.

The model is formulated using Bayesian framework and trained using Monte Carlo method and Metropolis criterion.

When the model was tested to estimate the risk of HIV infection given the demographic data it was found to give the accuracy of 62%.

The proposed model is able to combine the accuracy of the Bayesian MLP model and the transparency of Bayesian rough set model.

Read – The Dilbert Principle

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Today I finished reading “The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle’s-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions” by Scott Adams

Paper – Multilevel Thresholding for Image Segmentation through a Fast Statistical Recursive Algorithm

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Today I read a paper titled “Multilevel Thresholding for Image Segmentation through a Fast Statistical Recursive Algorithm”

The abstract is:
A novel algorithm is proposed for segmenting an image into multiple levels using its mean and variance.

Starting from the extreme pixel values at both ends of the histogram plot, the algorithm is applied recursively on sub-ranges computed from the previous step, so as to find a threshold level and a new sub-range for the next step, until no significant improvement in image quality can be achieved.

The method makes use of the fact that a number of distributions tend towards Dirac delta function, peaking at the mean, in the limiting condition of vanishing variance.

The procedure naturally provides for variable size segmentation with bigger blocks near the extreme pixel values and finer divisions around the mean or other chosen value for better visualization.

Experiments on a variety of images show that the new algorithm effectively segments the image in computationally very less time.

Paper – Towards a human eye behavior model by applying Data Mining Techniques on Gaze Information from IEC

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Today I read a paper titled “Towards a human eye behavior model by applying Data Mining Techniques on Gaze Information from IEC”

The abstract is:
In this paper, we firstly present what is Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) and rapidly how we have combined this artificial intelligence technique with an eye-tracker for visual optimization.

Next, in order to correctly parameterize our application, we present results from applying data mining techniques on gaze information coming from experiments conducted on about 80 human individuals.

Read – Free

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Today I finished reading “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” by Chris Anderson

Paper – Methods for Analytical Understanding of Agent-Based Modeling of Complex Systems

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Today I read a paper titled “Methods for Analytical Understanding of Agent-Based Modeling of Complex Systems”

The abstract is:
Von Neuman’s work on universal machines and the hardware development have allowed the simulation of dynamical systems through a large set of interacting agents.

This is a bottom-up approach which tries to derive global properties of a complex system through local interaction rules and agent behaviour.

Traditionally, such systems are modeled and simulated through top-down methods based on differential equations.

Agent-Based Modeling has the advantage of simplicity and low computational cost.

However, unlike differential equations, there is no standard way to express agent behaviour.

Besides, it is not clear how to analytically predict the results obtained by the simulation.

In this paper we survey some of these methods.

For expressing agent behaviour formal methods, like Stochastic Process Algebras have been used.

Such approach is useful if the global properties of interest can be expressed as a function of stochastic time series.

However, if space variables must be considered, we shall change the focus.

In this case, multiscale techniques, based on Chapman-Enskog expansion, was used to establish the connection between the microscopic dynamics and the macroscopic observables.

Also, we use data mining techniques,like Principal Component Analysis (PCA), to study agent systems like Cellular Automata.

With the help of these tools we will discuss a simple society model, a Lattice Gas Automaton for fluid modeling, and knowledge discovery in CA databases.

Besides, we show the capabilities of the NetLogo, a software for agent simulation of complex system and show our experience about.

Paper – Embedding Data within Knowledge Spaces

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Today I read a paper titled “Embedding Data within Knowledge Spaces”

The abstract is:
The promise of e-Science will only be realized when data is discoverable, accessible, and comprehensible within distributed teams, across disciplines, and over the long-term–without reliance on out-of-band (non-digital) means.

We have developed the open-source Tupelo semantic content management framework and are employing it to manage a wide range of e-Science entities (including data, documents, workflows, people, and projects) and a broad range of metadata (including provenance, social networks, geospatial relationships, temporal relations, and domain descriptions).

Tupelo couples the use of global identifiers and resource description framework (RDF) statements with an aggregatable content repository model to provide a unified space for securely managing distributed heterogeneous content and relationships.

Paper – Breaking Out of the Cell: On The Benefits of a New Spreadsheet User-Interaction Paradigm

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Today I read a paper titled “Breaking Out of the Cell: On The Benefits of a New Spreadsheet User-Interaction Paradigm”

The abstract is:
Contemporary spreadsheets are plagued by a profusion of errors, auditing difficulties, lack of uniform development methodologies, and barriers to easy comprehension of the underlying business models they represent.

This paper presents a case that most of these difficulties stem from the fact that the standard spreadsheet user-interaction paradigm – the ‘cell-matrix’ approach – is appropriate for spreadsheet data presentation but has significant drawbacks with respect to spreadsheet creation, maintenance and comprehension when workbooks pass a minimal threshold of complexity.

An alternative paradigm for the automated generation of spreadsheets directly from plain-language business model descriptions is presented along with its potential benefits.

Sunsight Modeller (TM), a working software system implementing the suggested paradigm, is briefly described.

Paper – Rapid Development of Morphological Descriptions for Full Language Processing Systems

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Today I read a paper titled “Rapid Development of Morphological Descriptions for Full Language Processing Systems”

The abstract is:
I describe a compiler and development environment for feature-augmented two-level morphology rules integrated into a full NLP system.

The compiler is optimized for a class of languages including many or most European ones, and for rapid development and debugging of descriptions of new languages.

The key design decision is to compose morphophonological and morphosyntactic information, but not the lexicon, when compiling the description.

This results in typical compilation times of about a minute, and has allowed a reasonably full, feature-based description of French inflectional morphology to be developed in about a month by a linguist new to the system..

Dragon Age: Origins has no moral choices

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I finally got around to installing Dragon Age: Origins over the weekend. I just kept putting it off because personal projects and a lot of other good games were vying for my meagre discretionary time outside of day-to-day work. I loved the look of the game and found the first few hours of game play absolutely enthralling as I made various choices, both moral and banal, to advance the story and determine how my character treated other people.

My room-mate was playing the game too, and her character was much more aggressive and short with various non-player characters in the game so that the attitude of how her character interacted with the world was far different from mine.

And on Sunday evening, just as I am really getting in to the game, and moving towards the “big ritual” I rage-quit during a cinematic.

Yep, I rage-quit a single player game.

This isn’t the first single player game I have rage-quit during a cinematic. Probably my first ever was Half-Life, during the opening sequence that cannot be skipped, that sets up the story, because I have no interest in watching some film school drop-out put his boring ass, directorial debut in to my video game. I took that one back to EB, and when they wouldn’t take it back I left the box on the counter and did a charge back on my credit card.

I don’t play games, emphasis on “play”, to be a passive, non-participant sat docilely at my computer whilst a non-interactive movie plays in the background.

For Modern Warfare 2, from reading the forums before purchase, I understood you could not skip the various movies that play until you had watched them at least once (three times because the stupid game is so prone to crashing on many systems that it doesn’t save your progress).

Ten minutes with a dis-assembler and some NOP instructions took care of that nonsense.

Now I get to play MW2 with no more stupid cinematic sequences along the lines of: “I’m your archetype, gruff voiced Special Forces General here to tell you all about what you need to do. You’re going in there and you’re going to shoot people. And then you’re going to shoot more people. And after that, I’ll ask you to indiscriminately shoot more people. Why? Because it’s an FPS son and that’s what we do. We shoot people.”

If your story/plot/cinematic for an FPS is any longer or contains any more exposition than that, you are seriously fucking over-thinking it.

I don’t need exposition and plot to play Pacman, or Space Invaders, or Tetris.

I don’t need that crap in an FPS either.

Yeah, yeah, very pretty story, bad guys need killing, what was my role again? Oh yeah, I shoot people in interesting ways with high powered semi-automatic weapons whilst running around hallways.

You think the people playing the multi-player version of MW2 give a shit about why they are killing the other players or require ten minutes of exposition on who screwed who?

Nobody cares if they are good or bad. Black, white or yellow. American or Russian or British. My role and your role, in an FPS game, is to kill stuff. Just tell me what needs to be eradicated and give me enough bullets to do the job properly.

But Dragon Age? Ah, that’s a different beast. The cinematic sequences advance the story and are tightly woven in to your decisions. You are presented, at every step, with moral choices that need to be made that shape your character, that determine how the story proceeds, to some degree at least within the confines of what is possible in a badly written branching plotline that ultimately has to be quite linear.

I quit the game, and have no intention of ever returning to it, over a moral choice.

I quit the game because when presented with a moral dilemma. I made a choice that was congruent with my character in the game, with how I wanted to interact with the world. I made a conscious choice to stop the game at that point and effectively initiate permanent character death. I made a moral choice, from the perspective of the game, and the only one I could make. Yes or no? Black or white? Good or bad? Justice or injustice? I chose “No.” I chose “justice.”

My character fought alongside three brave companions. We went in to the wilds together. We slew many beasts and foul creatures together. We gathered the necessary items for the handful of quests laid before us. I was their leader. I made the choices of whether to abandon an injured companion that was slowing me down or heal that person with the rare herbs and poultices available to us. When done with our quests, we all hurried back to town to take part in the secretive joining ritual to become one of the Grey Wardens. The ritual is so secretive they don’t tell you there is a high probability, in this case, 33%, that you could die during it. And they also don’t tell you that after you have been informed you have a high probability of dying, that should you then refuse the ritual, you will be killed.

One of my companions died after ingesting the poisonous blood that is to be drunk during the ritual, and my “trusted leader” stepped over his corpse as it fell, less concerned with his death than if he were a piece of damaged property that was no longer useful.

When my other companion protested this, and fear showed in his eyes, a seasoned knight of battle with a wife and child, our leader gutted him with no more thought than if he were practising his knife skills against a wicker and straw target.

I was bade to drink the poisonous blood that had already killed one of my companions, and as the cinematic began to play. I pressed ALT+F4 and said to myself “No. Here I make a moral choice. Here I change the story. Here is where I draw a line in the dirt. Here I say this is my decision. I will not join a regime, one that proclaims so much goodness against so much evil, that wants to bring justice to everyone, when it conducts such injustices against innocents itself. I raise my blade, and on this spot I will die, but I will die knowing that I stood for what is right and proper, and not because it was convenient.”

When you present someone with moral choices, and put the hype and spin on how wonderful your game is in how those choices can shape and alter the character and the story, but are so lazy that when the choices, for the player, become difficult, and it comes down to “enjoyment of the game” versus “the right thing to do” after preaching “the right thing” for so many hours, you break my suspension of disbelief. You break it so solidly that I have no interest in continuing to hear what you have to say no matter how entertaining you believe it may be.

Some people will overlook the problem, and go on to enjoy it. But if you, as the game designer, find the adulation of the crowd for a flawed product satisfying, perhaps you should consider a new vocation.

In fiction or game design, your world should be consistent and suspend disbelief. If it is not and does not, you are just a lazy hack whose frequent recourse to exploit deus ex machina is laughable. This “device” wasn’t interesting in Greek literature and plays, it is even less so in modern fiction. Fiction which also includes the “detailed and intricate plots” (I find this statement so laughable when I read it on the back of game boxes) found in games.

“Because I said so” makes for a very unsatisfying advancement to the plot. It is, as my old creative writing professor clearly stated, “the hallmark of a lazy hack who will be lauded for his cleverness by the common sheep who bleat because they know no better.”

“But dude, it’s just a game!”

No. It is “entertainment” and all good forms of entertainment, to be successful, to be interesting, to be enjoyable, must adhere to certain inviolable tenets. Anybody who consistently disregards these tenets is forever doomed to remain a “lazy hack.”

It seems, that after reading through the entire plot tree for Dragon Age : Origins, helpfully published online, I can unequivocally state that I would not have enjoyed the game for it’s story. As Dragon Age : Origins is supposedly all about the story, it would have been a frustrating experience to say the least. Glancing at the plot tree there are several “deus ex machina/because I said so” places that do not leave you with any choice but to go along for the ride.

Thing is, I don’t play video games “to go along for the ride.” I play video games to have an interactive experience where I make the choices. If all I want to do is ride, I can visit Disneyland or Universal Studios and be bored to tears because those places are stocked full of non-interactive “because I said so” rides.

Dragon Age : Origins – Enjoyed by sheep.

Read – Start with Why

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Today I finished reading “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action” by Simon Sinek

Paper – Finding overlapping communities in networks by label propagation

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Today I read a paper titled “Finding overlapping communities in networks by label propagation”

The abstract is:
We propose an algorithm for finding overlapping community structure in very large networks.

The algorithm is based on the label propagation technique of Raghavan, Albert, and Kumara, but is able to detect communities that overlap.

Like the original algorithm, vertices have labels that propagate between neighbouring vertices so that members of a community reach a consensus on their community membership.

Our main contribution is to extend the label and propagation step to include information about more than one community: each vertex can now belong to up to v communities, where v is the parameter of the algorithm.

Our algorithm can also handle weighted and bipartite networks.

Tests on an independently designed set of benchmarks, and on real networks, show the algorithm to be highly effective in recovering overlapping communities.

It is also very fast and can process very large and dense networks in a short time.

Paper – A Decision-Making Support System Based on Know-How

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Today I read a paper titled “A Decision-Making Support System Based on Know-How”

The abstract is:
The research results described are concerned with: – developing a domain modeling method and tools to provide the design and implementation of decision-making support systems for computer integrated manufacturing; – building a decision-making support system based on know-how and its software environment.

The research is funded by NEDO, Japan.

Paper – A Fuzzy Relational Identification Algorithm and Its Application to Predict The Behaviour of a Motor Drive System

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Today I read a paper titled “A Fuzzy Relational Identification Algorithm and Its Application to Predict The Behaviour of a Motor Drive System”

The abstract is:
Fuzzy relational identification builds a relational model describing systems behaviour by a nonlinear mapping between its variables.

In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy relational algorithm based on simplified max-min relational equation.

The algorithm presents an adaptation method applied to gravity-center of each fuzzy set based on error integral value between measured and predicted system output, and uses the concept of time-variant universe of discourses.

The identification algorithm also includes a method to attenuate noise influence in extracted system relational model using a fuzzy filtering mechanism.

The algorithm is applied to one-step forward prediction of a simulated and experimental motor drive system.

The identified model has its input-output variables (stator-reference current and motor speed signal) treated as fuzzy sets, whereas the relations existing between them are described by means of a matrix R defining the relational model extracted by the algorithm.

The results show the good potentialities of the algorithm in predict the behaviour of the system and attenuate through the fuzzy filtering method possible noise distortions in the relational model.

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